Government needs to think beyond building websites, says Viral B Shah

By the time he was in his eighth standard, Viral B Shah, co-author of `Rebooting India Realising a Billion Aspirations', knew that coding was his passion. It started with BASIC and led to Julia, a language designed to meet the requirements of numerical, scientific and general purpose programming.The 35-year-old, who grew up in Mumbai in “a traditional and simple Gujarati family“, landed in Bengaluru in 2010 to work with UIDAI.“After my PhD at the University of California, Santa Barbara, I worked at Interactive Supercomputing, a small startup. It was acquired by Microsoft and I decided not to join a large software company and instead moved back to India to work on Aadhaar,“ he said.

Shah also started working on Julia, with three others, at the same time. “Aadhaar by daytime, Julia at night,“ he added.

Aadhaar led to his association with Nandan Nilekani, the IT czar who later became his co-author.

Shah’s role in the project focussed on facilitating various government payments such as subsidies, social security benefits and peer-to-peer remittances using Aadhaar.

The book, which grew out of the experiences from the Aadhaar project, aims to solve the challenges that the country faces . “ With our book , Rebooting India, Nandan and I project all our learning to solve various grand challenges that India faces using software at the core. We believe that a government needs to not just create websites but completely reimagine gover nance with technology at the core, just like Amazon did with retail or Uber and Ola did with taxis,” he said.

Shah feels that the energy for tech in general and startups in particular is palpable.

“Bengaluru is, according to me, the only rival to silicon valley.

The ecosystem is evolving. It is the hub for people with coding degrees. IoT has become a big thing here. There are makerspaces coming up and hackathons happening. There is so much energy and innovation happening,” he said.

Apart from the geek that he is, this passionate coder loves to hike and play Ultimate Frisbee and says that his favourite Bengaluru moments have been, “Taking the walk with Bangalore Walks down MG Road and learning about the city’s scientific past — the most interesting being the great trigonometric mapping of India that started at Trinity Church.” He also has a thing for idlis and enjoys trying them at different eateries.

But having said all that, the entrepreneur in him wants to help nurture the upcoming ones. “I love meeting with entrepreneurs who are thinking of one crazy idea after another — trying to change India and the world, all with an app,” Shah said.